Free Republic

Gregory Baum, heretical ex-priest In case you weren’t convinced that Vatican II was plagued from its inception with a demonic spirit, how about the fact that the writer of Nostra Aetate was concealing his gay lifestyle and flatly rejected the Church’s teaching on sexuality and non-Catholic relations?  (LifeSiteNews) — 93-year-old Gregory Baum, a famed Canadian Catholic ex-priest, has in his latest book revealed that he secretly led an active homosexual life for decades.Baum, who was a peritus or expert at the Second Vatican Council, reportedly composed the first draft of the conciliar document Nostra aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian...

A new book by a priest who led the vanguard of dissent on birth control in Canada reveals for the first time his decades living as an active homosexual. Father Gregory Baum, a laicized priest married to a former nun for 30 years, admits in his forthcoming autobiography The Oil Has Not Run Dry that his wife did not mind the fact that he had a gay priest-lover on the side. "Shirley did not mind that, when we moved to Montreal in 1986, I met Normand, a former priest, with whom I fell in love," Baum writes in Chapter 32....

Gun control efforts are largely a culture-war offensive by liberals who dislike the parts of America that own guns and love guns. This meddling motivation shines through in the rhetoric of gun control advocates and in the laws they push. For many gun owners, the firearm is not merely a tool for the practical purpose of self-defense. Nor is it simply recreational equipment, like a golf club. It's a cultural signifier, and a totem of a worldview. Dan Baum, a Jewish liberal who wears turtlenecks but also owns guns, writes in his new book, "Gun Guys," that firearms in America...

On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. The party is the firm’s big annual bash. Employees wear Halloween costumes to the office, where they party...

L. Frank Baum claimed to have written The Wonderful Wizard of Oz “solely to pleasure the children” of his day, but scholars have found enough parallels between Dorothy’s yellow-brick odyssey and the politics of 1890s Populism to suggest otherwise. Did Baum intend to pen a subtle political satire on monetary reform or merely an entertaining fantasy? “The story of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ was written solely to pleasure children of today” (Dighe 2002, 42). So wrote L. Frank Baum in the introduction to his popular children’s story published in 1900. As fertile as his imagination was, Baum could hardly...

ALBANY, Sept. 13 — Private lawyers for two top aides to Gov. Eliot Spitzer said on Thursday that they would not fight subpoenas issued by the State Ethics Commission earlier this week. Terence L. Kindlon, a lawyer for Darren Dopp, the governor’s communications director, said his client told him to abandon his plan to fight a subpoena and instead cooperate with the commission. And Steven F. Reich, a lawyer for Richard Baum, the secretary to the governor, also said his client would not fight the subpoena issued to him. Two months ago, the governor said he and his staff had...